Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

Karl Rove would not be a good AOL poster boy. Nor is he helping the White House in the U.S. Attorney firings scandal. “You’ve deleted mail!” is not a catch-phrase endearing to Congress, Bush, Gonzales , and the GOP.

But Rove’s attorney Robert ‘Bud’ Luskin of Patton Boggs is doing a doublespeak dance for his client. He told the N.Y. Times that his client “always understood that his R.N.C. e-mails were being archived..He has never asked or sought any kind of special treatment to permit him to delete anything.”

His deletion of volumes of e-mails on his RNC account was just a mistake, and unintentional, Luskin asserts.

Mistakes and misunderstandings don’t make the e-mail deletion legitimate. The $64,000 questions is whether a federal grand jury would believe that Rove’s e-mail deletion was just a harmless misunderstanding of federal law, or whether he tried to obstruct justice and try to erase a trial of evidence that could potentially incriminate him in a White House and GOP scandal.

Why would Rove ask for any special treatment? That doesn’t make sense if it’s more pragmatic for him to do as he likes.

But it’s significant that Alberto Gonzales was White House Counsel for Bush during the period of time when Rove is accused of deleting his RNC e-mails that he is accused of using to evade complying with the federal law requiring White House employees to preserve their e-mails.

As White House Counsel, Gonzales was the lawyer tasked with ensuring White House compliance with federal law, not the violation of it.

Remember: the e-mail deletion happened on Gonzales’ watch.